NEW YORK, NY.- Derek Eller Gallery presents Adam Marnie and Tom Thayer in the Main Gallery and Ruby Sky Stiler in the North Room.

In a sequence of intimate photo collages and a large-scale wall installation, Adam Marnie uses flowers as flexible signifiers within an array of conversations. They connect to art history (from Dutch still-life to Mapplethorpe), as well as having everyday uses (weddings, funerals), and common thematic embodiments (sex, death, beauty, the passage of time). Marnie takes this familiar subject (a humble vase of flowers photographed in his studio) and makes it the starting point for a series of performative actions: meticulous cutting, re-configuring, and gluing. And in the case of the wall installation, these actions become even more exaggerated, as he cuts into the sheetrock, removing large sections and bringing the wall into the foreground while collaging the flowers onto its surface. Adam Marnie’s work was recently featured in group exhibitions at James Fuentes LLC and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

Tom Thayer’s paper puppets and scenery are components of his surrealistic cutout animations. Framed and presented as collages, these compositions explore invented, private worlds. By-products of a lo-fi animation process in which Thayer uses antiquated post-production technology and incorporates his own experimental music, these collages have a functional history. As such, they evoke the artist’s improvisational and deeply personal practice. At the same time, Thayer’s idiosyncratic imagery, combining peculiar characters within dilapidated and desolate environments, possesses universality on a metaphysical level. Tom Thayer will have a concurrent exhibition with Dave Miko entitled New World Pig at The Kitchen, New York, and will do a performance at Tracey Williams Ltd. on January 13 and 15, 2011.

North Room: Ruby Sky Stiler, An Artificial Return
At first glance, Ruby Sky Stiler’s wall reliefs seem to be direct quotations from classical antiquity. In fact, she has cobbled together an incongruous pastiche of imagery and objects which reference a myriad of sources, both ancient and modern. To that end, Stiler explores the notion of authenticity: how it is perceived, creates value, and can prompt an atmosphere of authority surrounding an object. The work delves further into this question via materials. Appearing as though a conservator of antiquities haphazardly pieced together chiseled marble fragments to make a whole, Stiler’s wall reliefs are actually constructed from contemporary art supplies: acrylic resin, foam, polymer adhesive, and pigment. Ruby Sky Stiler’s work was included in the 2010 Emerging Artist Fellowship Exhibition at Socrates Sculpture Park; she will also have a solo exhibition at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery running January 21 - February 27, 2011.